...this might be overkill (a new mod) but you could try to find a Captcha mod that forces Guests to answer a Captcha to post & to register...but registered people don't need to answer a Captcha to post.
Combined with having the minimum time between posts, this would prevent any or most kinds of automatic and semi-automatic spamming to occur. This would also prevent someone from posting spam all at once.
At least with the steps above, it would make the spammer's efforts and time to be wasted. Why would someone post spam when it is known it is hard enough to actually fill a post with spam and post one? Even if the spammer is corageous enough to post, there would be a moderator to delete it right after.
...I (normally) don't wanna register cuz I don't wanna get spam by giving out my e-mail to a website I'm only gonna use once...sometime I google, find a post, know the answer, but can't post without registering, so I can't help them. Their loss. I registered here, cuz I didn't fear spam (too much, you didn't get my ISP e-mail address, but no one gets THAT! lol) & I wanted to own my name, be able to edit posts & knew I'd be here more than once...etc.
You're right. A lot of spam comes to my mailbox every day and I just put all messages from unknown people directly for deletion.
However, when you register, there is an option for your profile not to show your e-mail address, and I believe the AHK forums are secure enough to hold the e-mail address and, at least for me, a password is not a big problem to remember.
I think it'd be ok to only allow Guests in Ask for Help, Bug Reports & General Chat. There are forums where you can't even post in the Help section as a Guest, but what if you have trouble logging in? huh? what do they want you to do? You could probably go ahead & disallow Guests from even replying in Announcements, cuz they don't really need in there.
If it is possible to prevent automatic spam, then I would like guest posting to be allowed anywhere. It won't matter where the spam post is located - this post will always be an important thing for deletion for a moderator. Thus there is actually no reasoning for limiting guest access to some forum. All forums should have guest posting either enabled or disabled in my opinion.
Spam posting is not going to be a big problem if it is slowed down enough to be even slower than moderator's time to find and to delete a spam post.
The only solution I see apart from completely disallow posting with guest rights (I understand why this is obviously not an option) is some kind of automatic SPAM filter that recognizes bad URLs or keywords like casino, lucky, betting, roulette, s*x, viagra, ...
But I don't know if there exists s.th like this for phpbb.
This could help, but spammers might use links to hosted websites into some different hosting company and you would block any pages from the hosting company domain. Blocking keywords might also help, but I also think bots sometimes would recognize that a posting has been blocked and would try again with some other different keyword.
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Last active: Jun 17 2014 05:18 AM
But if you think closely at why registration exists, you would know about what I'm talking about.
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